ALTIOTAKE FROM 12-16 APRIL

Each week, we review the press, highlighting and responding to interesting and relevant articles in the news.

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Impossibly Possible

The impossible may become possible as Reuters reports that the plant-based meat company, Impossible Foods, is preparing for public listing this year. Impossible Foods could be valued at over $10B, significantly higher than its $4B valuation in 2020. Impossible Foods would join its rival Beyond Meat, who are currently trading over 400% its 2019 IPO prices. Meticulous Research predicts that the plant-based food market will grow at a CAGR of 11.9% for the next seven years, reaching $74.2B by 2027. The plant-based, meat-alternative market received a boost in demand from COVID-19 (280% in the US), as consumers became wary of the connections between public health and animal meat consumption. If Impossible Foods chooses to go public, it’s quite likely to enter a robust and blossoming market.

Microsoft’s Healthy Acquisition

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Nuance Communications, a pioneer of ambient clinical intelligence and conversational AI. Nuance is currently used by 77% of US hospitals and more than 55% of physicians. Nuance will build upon Microsoft’s industry-specific cloud strategy, growing the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare announced in 2020. The speech to text capabilities that Nuance boasts was likely not the primary selling factor as Microsoft already has these abilities, demonstrating the company’s commitment to a healthcare cloud strategy. At $19.7B, it is one of the most expensive purchases by Microsoft, second only to the acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2B.

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Nvidia’s Saving Grace

At Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference this week, the company announced an Arm-based data centre CPU called Grace, designed to tackle complex computing requirements like natural language processing, recommender systems, and AI supercomputing. The chip’s namesake comes from Grace Hopper, the computer-programming pioneer. Nvidia believes that a proprietary CPU-GPU platform can accelerate the development of computer-based “general intelligence.”  Grace will help build the supercomputers of tomorrow, including the Swiss National Computing Centre’s supercomputer called Alps and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Altio is excited to see Grace’s capabilities, which could develop supercomputers with 10x the performance of the fastest supercomputers of today.

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